Senior Software Engineer II, Network Datapath
DigitalOcean4 hours ago
Base Salary
$167k - $209k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software for cloud infrastructure.
- Build packet-processing, forwarding, routing, filtering, tunneling, load-balancing, traffic-steering, and network-virtualization systems.
- Develop networking functionality across host systems, the Linux kernel, user space, and hardware-accelerated datapaths.
- Analyze and improve throughput, latency, CPU efficiency, scalability, reliability, and packet-processing performance.
- Build datapath observability, telemetry, debugging, automated testing, benchmarking, and performance-monitoring frameworks.
- Integrate datapath software with DPUs, SmartNICs, programmable NICs, and other hardware acceleration technologies.
- Investigate complex production networking issues including packet drops, latency, throughput degradation, CPU utilization, and unexpected traffic behavior.
- Drive technical projects from design through production deployment, author RFCs and architecture documents, and document technical decisions.
- Participate in design reviews, provide technical guidance, mentor engineers, and improve engineering and networking practices.
Requirements
- Strong experience designing and developing production software in C, C++, or Go.
- Strong networking and packet-processing knowledge, including TCP/IP, routing, switching, VLANs, VXLAN, BGP, ECMP, NAT, load balancing, and network virtualization.
- Experience developing software for Linux-based networking systems and understanding Linux kernel networking internals, namespaces, sockets, queues, interrupts, and NIC drivers.
- Experience with high-performance networking technologies such as DPDK, XDP, eBPF, AF_XDP, or SR-IOV.
- Experience with multithreaded and concurrent software, performance analysis, profiling, benchmarking, and troubleshooting.
- Ability to reason across hardware, operating systems, networking, and applications and independently drive complex projects to production.
- Strong technical writing and communication skills, including the ability to produce RFCs, architecture documents, technical proposals, and implementation plans.
- Preferred experience includes hardware-accelerated networking, DPUs, SmartNICs, IPUs, programmable NICs, DPU-based networking, P4, PCIe, DMA, NIC architecture, cloud or hyperscale infrastructure, Linux kernel networking code, NIC drivers, 400G+ networking, programmable switches, and open-source projects such as Linux, DPDK, eBPF, or OVS.
Benefits
- Remote role.
- Competitive benefits vary by location and include an Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Conference, training, and education reimbursement plus access to LinkedIn Learning courses.
- Eligible employees may receive bonuses, equity compensation, equity grants upon hire, and access to an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
About DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure and platform services for developers, startups, and small to mid-sized businesses, including virtual machines (Droplets), managed Kubernetes and databases, object/block storage, networking, and GPUs for AI workloads. It operates a usage-based, self-service public cloud with APIs, CLI, and a marketplace to deploy and scale applications. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, DigitalOcean is a public company listed on the NYSE.